One or more aspects of the invention relate, in general, to processing within a communications environment, and in particular, to facilitating debug and/or recovery processing within such a communications environment.
Enterprise class computing systems, such as System z® offered by International Business Machines Corporation, require complex system functions beyond their mainline data handling of processing features. Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) are a key set of requirements of an enterprise system. Enterprise systems implement advanced techniques to ensure the integrity of customer data and quick return of service when hardware failures occur. The complexity of the combined elements that make up the system requires enhanced debug features to enable the efficient isolation of design problems and their identification of root cause sources.
Enterprise class features of recovery and debug capabilities have only recently been added to certain interconnect technologies, such as PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) and PCIe (PCI Express). As PCI and PCIe have evolved, their recovery and debug capabilities have grown increasingly sophisticated and now include some enterprise class features relating to recovery and debugging. However, the adding of the enterprise class features has resulted in unfavorable situations at times.